For their first date, in February 1953, Richard Seaver and Jeannette Medina went to see a new play called En Attendant Godot. In her telling, there were fewer than a dozen people in the audience. Dick put the number at “thirty-some,” though only half of them made it to the end. Still, he later recalled, it was an improvement over the opening night, a few weeks earlier, when the house was almost as barren as the withered tree onstage.
Dick, a collegiate wrestler and naval officer from New England, had come to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in 1950 to study at the Sorbonne. One day, while passing the publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit, two books in the window caught his eye: Molloy and Malone Meurt. Both were by Samuel Beckett, a name he’d come across while writing his thesis on James Joyce. Unlike a lot of Left Bank expats, Dick spoke flawless French, which was a good thing, because the novels weren’t available in English.
In the second issue of Merlin, a new literary magazine whose small staff he had joined, Dick declared that Beckett merited “the attention of anyone interested in this century’s literature.” It was a bold statement, considering that Beckett’s first novel, Murphy, had only just earned out the author’s low two-figure advance.
When he learned, from the publisher of Les Éditions de Minuit, that Beckett had a novel in a drawer called Watt, Dick let it be known that he was interested. A month or so later, on a “dark and stormy evening,” Beckett himself appeared at Dick’s door, handed him a sheaf of papers, and “strode off into the night.”
“Watt!,” Dick exclaimed to his fellow editors.
“What?” came the reply.
“I said, Watt.”
“Sounds to me like ‘Who’s on first?’”
The “Merlin juveniles,” as Beckett called them, published an excerpt from Watt in the magazine’s third issue, the first of many contributions from their 47-year-old discovery. In a testament to the group’s unwavering support, French postal authorities denied them periodicals-class mailing rates after determining that Merlin “exists primarily as an organ of propaganda dedicated to furthering the name and fortunes of Mr. Beckett.”
So when Dick asked Jeannette if she liked the play, he wasn’t just making conversation. What might have happened if she gave Godot a thumbs-down will forever remain a mystery, because she loved it. “Little do I know,” she writes in her unfinished memoirs, that “I just passed the ‘Beckett test.’ We are married six months later.” They remained by each other’s side—first as husband and wife, and then as partners in publishing—until Dick’s death, in 2009.
For decades, they manned the vanguard of the counterculture, at one point actually linking arms with William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, and Terry Southern at an anti-war march during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As editor of Grove Press and its magazine, Evergreen Review, under maverick publisher Barney Rosset, Dick helped fight and win a number of landmark First Amendment cases, freeing the entire industry to publish without fear of government censorship (or hope of free publicity).
Besides Beckett and Genet, Dick introduced American readers to Eugène Ionesco, E. M. Cioran, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, to name a few. He specialized in aesthetically, socially, and politically radical books, including Naked Lunch, City of Night, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Wretched of the Earth, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—a vocation that became a family business when Jeannette entered the trade.
As shocking as anything the Seavers published is the total absence of addiction, deviance, and scandal in their private lives. Who could have imagined that the man who translated both The 120 Days of Sodom and The Story of O was a devoted father of three, happily married to the same woman for 55 years? By all accounts, Dick and Jeannette’s half-century-long love affair was the stuff of fairy tales, a romance too mawkish for their own modernist sensibilities.
They manned the vanguard of the counterculture, at one point actually linking arms with William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, and Terry Southern.
Dick grew up in Watertown, Connecticut, Jeannette in occupied Paris. His father was a textile-plant manager and dyed-in-the-wool Republican; his mother, a churchgoing homemaker. Her father was a newspaperman and regular at La Coupole who gave Brassaï his first camera; her mother, a popular nightclub singer who roomed with Marlene Dietrich.
By the time Dick was old enough to enlist, the Allies had won. What he had experienced only in newsreels had formed Jeannette’s earliest memories. In 1940, after having moved from Paris to Brussels two years earlier, she, like millions of others, was forced to flee the advancing Nazis on foot, an event known as “the exodus.” Arriving at the French border just in time for Marshal Pétain’s surrender, they turned around and returned to Brussels—a combined journey of almost 350 miles. Back in Paris a year later, Jeannette’s father spied for the French Resistance while the area around her boarding school was bombed day and night.
On Christmas Eve, 1951, Dick was shucking oysters, with some difficulty, in his one good suit at the home of a French academic when Jeannette, the daughter of a mutual friend, walked in. A full year passed before he saw her again, at the same annual dinner. They rang in the New Year together, two weeks later, and were engaged by Easter. The Seavers left Paris for New York the following June.
Dick was running George Braziller’s book clubs when Rosset, who had been one of Merlin’s 100-odd subscribers, lured him to Grove Press in 1959. Jeannette, who had studied the violin at the Conservatoire de Paris, meanwhile resumed her training at Juilliard, before going on to play some of the world’s grandest concert halls. For one tour, she was loaned a 17th-century Stradivarius, which, Dick decided, had to be hers. It took some convincing, but Chase Manhattan approved the couple’s application for a violin mortgage.
Dick, Jeannette, and their two young children, Nathalie and Alex, were living in Bronxville when they heard about a vacancy on Coenties Slip, near the South Street Seaport. Officially, the two-block row was zoned for industrial use; unofficially, “the Slip” housed a collective of young artists including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Jack Youngerman, and the actress Delphine Seyrig. When the group’s live-work studios were torn down, the Seavers moved to Central Park West, this time for good.
Jeannette’s apartment is filled with art by her former Slip-mates, none more striking than Kelly’s Dada-esque portrait of Dick. Composed in 1959 from the table scraps of a celebratory dinner—mussel shells for eyes, a pineapple crown for hair—the mixed-media birthday gift has been slowly decomposing ever since. “I wanted to restore it, but Ellsworth said, ‘No, I like it this way!,’” Jeannette says with a shrug.
After giving birth to her third child, Nicholas, Jeannette retired from music to be a full-time mom, over the objections of her manager and her newly feminist friends. Coincidentally, though, Dick had just left Grove to start his own imprint, Seaver Books, at Viking Press. “He said, ‘Let’s do it together,’” Jeannette recalls. “I said, ‘A, I can’t speak English. And b, I’ve never worked in an office.’” Dick, however, was undeterred. Early on, Jeannette’s lack of publishing experience was resented by some of her colleagues. Then, in 1975, the company hired an even more conspicuous middle-aged novice. “Jackie O was starting her second career at Viking,” Jeannette says, “and I felt if she can do it, I can too.”
Dick became head of Penguin USA and then Holt, Rinehart and Winston, at the time a subsidiary of CBS, leaving Jeannette to run Seaver Books by herself. When Holt’s new parent company, Holtzbrinck, eliminated profit-sharing, in 1988, Little, Brown (then owned by Time Inc.) offered Dick and Jeannette the chance to start another imprint, which they named Arcade. It was not an homage to Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” she says, nor did it signify “a reverence for pinball machines. It just came out of nowhere.”
When Little, Brown became a division of Time Warner, in 1993, the Seavers bought Arcade for nothing, a deal negotiated by their M.B.A.-trained son, Alex. To help finance their newly independent venture, the couple sold more than 200 letters from their old friend Beckett, along with Jeannette’s Stradivarius.
“It was great fun, though things were kind of rocky at certain points,” says Timothy Bent, the executive editor of Oxford University Press, who began his career at Arcade in 1991. “I don’t think any of the advances that I paid were competitive with anybody, but that’s not why authors would come to Arcade. It was for Dick and Jeannette’s sense of commitment and enthusiasm.” Because they couldn’t outbid the bigger houses, the Seavers “looked in places nobody else looked.” There, they found Mo Yan, Natalia Ginzburg, Ismail Kadare, and Andreï Makine, among others.
Time Warner and, later, Hachette handled Arcade’s distribution until 2009, when Dick suffered a fatal heart attack after a game of tennis, at which point Jeannette was cut loose. When the imprint filed for bankruptcy, in 2010, she discovered that Arcade was $6.3 million in debt. “In a commendable effort to keep the company going, Dick apparently made some decisions that turned out to be financial errors,” Jeannette writes.
Then, when all seemed lost, in rode an unlikely savior: Tony Lyons, of Skyhorse, who bought the company’s assets for $548,000. (The debt was discharged in the bankruptcy.) Publishers Weekly called it “a lively auction,” but, according to Lyons, there was only one other bidder.
“Jackie O was starting her second career at Viking, and I felt if she can do it, I can too.”
Skyhorse, which had grown since its founding in 2006 to encompass more than a dozen imprints, publishing everything from outdoor guides to Minecraft fan fiction, was nobody’s idea of a hothouse. But it was Lyons’s association with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose anti-vaccine broadsides he published (and whose political-action committee he later co-chaired), that troubled Jeannette’s friends. “I had people tell me they didn’t want to talk to me anymore,” she recalls. While Jeannette understood and even shared their misgivings, she found Lyons to be an agreeable and reliable owner.
Dick’s prediction that Mo Yan would someday win the Nobel Prize in Literature finally came to pass in 2012, and thanks to Skyhorse, Jeannette had the resources to rush 50,000 new copies of Yan’s books into print. When she informed Lyons on March 2, 2020, that Arcade would be publishing Woody Allen’s memoir, which had been dropped hours earlier by Hachette, he replied, “We are? Great.” Bound books were in stores by the end of the month.
Jeannette stepped down from Arcade this past January. “I didn’t feel the affinity anymore. I don’t want to be with Mrs. Trump,” she says, referring to the First Lady’s memoir, Melania, which Skyhorse published in October 2024. By that point, though, a trio of new editors—Bruce Wagner, Stephan Zguta, and Isaac Morris—stood ready to pick up where the Seavers had left off.
Wagner, a veteran novelist and screenwriter, came to Arcade in 2022. Although nearly all of his previous books bore the imprint of major publishers, his 12th novel, Roar, an “oral biography” of a bi-racial, transgender Zelig figure, found no takers among the Big Five. At the suggestion of his agent, Andrew Wylie, who told him, “The last house on the block is a man named Tony Lyons,” Wagner went knocking and found that he felt right at home. He has since published two more books with Arcade, reissued a stack of earlier works, overseen an anthology of short stories by Frederick Barthelme, and vouched for new authors, such as Emmalea Russo and Ben Faulkner. I heard him described variously as a consulting editor, resident novelist, and consigliere.
After Jeannette’s longtime deputy, Cal Barksdale, retired in 2023, Lyons promoted Zguta, a recent postgraduate from Massachusetts. Zguta brought in a group of younger writers—Matthew Davis, Dimes Square playwright Matthew Gasda, and Noah Kumin, editor of the downtown journal The Mars Review of Books—associated with the late, lamented underground reading-and-performance series hosted by another Beckett: Rosset’s son.
When Lyons wanted to hire a junior editor, Zguta recommended Morris, a Deep Springs alumnus working the popcorn machine at the Nitehawk Cinema near Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, where Zguta had been moonlighting one day a week. Some months later, Morris listened to an episode of the TrueAnon podcast, in which the writer William T. Vollmann told the hosts that his latest novel had been rejected by Viking because the text exceeded a million words. In short, it was available.
Morris and Zguta made their pitch to Lyons. “We said, ‘This is a 3,000-page book about the history of the C.I.A. by a National Book Award–winning author,’” Morris recalls. “He laughed, and was like, ‘Has there ever been a novel that long?’ And we said, ‘Well, maybe Proust.’ But basically, he just said yes. The extremes of it only made it more appealing to him.” A Table for Fortune, the second half of which Morris says changed his life, will be released next March as a four-volume set.
“It’s longer than Infinite Jest,” notes the writer and editor Ross Barkan, whose next novel, Colossus, is forthcoming from Arcade. “If a new Infinite Jest showed up today, there is no corporate publisher that would sniff it. Arcade feels like the last place that would still put out a book like that. I don’t really care that Skyhorse also published a Melania book. The truth is, if you’re with a Big Five conglomerate, they have an arm that is putting out conservative books, too, because those books make a lot of money.”
Novelist Tao Lin likens Arcade to McSweeney’s, the indie imprint founded by Dave Eggers in 1998, for its mix of “once-famous authors that have apparently been abandoned by their publishers” and “exciting new writers.” Wagner, a product of pilfered Grove and New Directions paperbacks, says, “I feel I’m almost re-dreaming my early experiences with those fearless publishing houses.” Morris, for his part, is reluctant to call it a renaissance. “We’re just trying to do right by the name,” he says.
While rooting around the Seavers’ archives, Zguta stumbled across a promotional letter written by Rosset for an Evergreen Review anthology. “There was a wide disparity in the contents from the first issue on,” it read. “One could have accused us of having something for everyone. More likely, something to offend everyone.” The last four words became Arcade’s new motto.
Jeannette is now 93, with six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. An expert chef who published a cookbook with Knopf in 1975, she still makes every course from scratch when hosting a dinner party. She also continues to read new manuscripts, but mostly she is busy revising her memoirs, which Lyons has expressed interest in publishing. “I said, ‘Thank you, Tony. I love you. Maybe,’” Jeannette recalls.
While the index of her life story reads like a college syllabus, Jeannette says she’ll leave the scholarship to others: “It’s a personal thing.” But she does venture one very intriguing theory.
Many years after she had aced “the Beckett test,” and Beckett himself had won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, Dick and Jeannette passed through Roussillon, the ochre-colored village in Provence where Beckett and his wife hid from the Nazis. There, they heard about a local bus driver whose notoriously unreliable service during the war years had made him a topic of frequent complaint. His name? Monsieur Godot. On their return to Paris, the Seavers excitedly relayed the tidbit to Beckett. “Sam’s reaction?,” Jeannette writes. “A big grin.”
Ash Carter is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
